Adaptive thesaurus employing semantic distance, relational inheritance and nominal compound interpretation for linguistic support of information retrieval

Presented is a domain specific thesaurus for linguistic support of an information broker. It employs an adaptive semantic distance function based on pathfinder networks and algorithms for automated population by nominal compound interpretation and relational inheritance. Created in support of the National Information Infrastructure Testbed for Diagnostic and Prognostic Maintenance of Equipment and Processes, funded by the US Department of Energy, the thesaurus and information broker were demonstrated through two pilot applications: Internet-based decision support for maintenance and operation of the Eddystone powerplant near Philadelphia, PA, and maintenance of the Allison T-56 engine used in the E2-C naval aircraft. The structure of the thesaurus was formalized to facilitate application in other domains and to further the understanding of thesauri, linguistic support methodologies and automated language processing in general.